Web development nostalgia

1999-2001 (spgames.co.uk)

I began making websites at the age of 14. The first one of note was spgames.co.uk. Back then I thought Arial narrow and orange on black was a good idea. It used frames and had a hit counter and was suprisingly popular. I am actually more of a fan of South Park these days then back then, but thankfully my web design skills have improved since back then.

February 2003 (Jonny's world)

This domain was born somewhere around 2004 as a site called "Jonny's world"'. I was young, I was a college student. I blogged about my life there. I posted photos (this was before Facebook was a thing) and I linked to things that I liked (this was before Twitter was a thing). In terms of web development I still thought frames were the best thing ever. In my own words it was a location for people to visit in hopefully a few years, months time or in a regular basis to give people memories of certain events.. such as the school leavers ball, a certain party, our time at school.". Sadly the web is not kind and due to a broken harddrive most of those images were lost. The wayback machine is the only way back into that period of time. Quite a few people making the transition from high school to college found it and I'd often get e-mails asking me for an insight to life at York University. I ended up creating a website for that purpose and that purpose alone - yo10.co.uk ... but then Facebook came along and made it entirely redundant.

2008 - TiddlyWiki and notepadding

As I began work, I started to realise I needed to use this website as a brand. Twitter was now a thing. Google was now a big thing. I tore everything down and started using this homepage as a notepad

2011 - resume

Blogging ceased. Instead this webpage became a list of all the things I was doing. A showcase of sorts of what I was capable of. It went through a few iterations.

2017 - a redirect

Due to some hosting issues, living in the USA but being hosted in the UK, I ended up getting a new domain - jon robson domain. This taught me the hard way abou how fragile the web can be. Google had indexed my https version of my old site and thus I appeared to disappear from Google. My new page despite having all the same content, was now punished in the google rankings - it turns out age is a big factor in how you rank.

2018

Keen to try netifly and play with gatsby.js, I resurrect my old domain. I'll let you know what I learn about Googl rankings in the process... I spend some time reflecting.